How Cloud Enables Digital Transformation for Small and Medium Businesses

Whether you are an owner of a thriving small business or a decision maker at an established enterprise, you cannot ignore digital technology. Businesses worldwide are going digital to deliver compelling experiences to customers, which is becoming a key differentiating factor.

The rise of social and mobile have increased the discoverability of businesses. Consumers are turning to social media to find the right product and retailers based on recommendations and reviews from their friends. Before embracing social media, it is important for businesses to have a visible online presence. Having a website is the first step towards adopting the digital transformation strategy. It becomes the focal point for establishing a strong online presence, which will be amplified through search engine optimization, digital ads, and social media engagement.

As a small and medium business owner, you should invest in a domain name that is representative of your company. There are many tips for buying the right domain for your company. Once you block the domain, then comes the most challenging part of going online – web hosting.

Traditionally, technology-savvy entrepreneurs chose a web hosting platform for publishing their corporate website. But with the emergence of cloud computing, there are cheaper and efficient alternatives available.

Cloud companies such as DigitalOcean and Packet are designed for developers and startups. DigitalOcean is a young New York-based cloud computing company that offers best of the both worlds – web hosting and cloud. Linode is another provider specializing in Virtual Private Servers (VPS), that offer dedicated virtual machines to developers. Even those businesses with no dedicated technology teams can quickly get started with DigitalOcean and Linode.

Pricing ModelSmall and medium businesses are cost conscious and do not want to commit their spending for the long term. Web hosting companies sell plans that include hosting space and bandwidth on an annual basis. Customers must sign a contract that locks for them for a year. Some of the offerings such as DigitalOcean and Amazon Lightsail offer a flexible pricing model that starts from $5 a month with no annual contracts and commitments. Customers can assess the return on investment on the website month on the month before increasing the spend. Cloud computing converts capital expenditure to operational costs, which doesn’t burden entrepreneurs.

FlexibilityThe technology landscape is moving fast. Consumers are rapidly adopting technology as a tool to make decisions. Businesses need to align with the pace of technology to stay connected with potential customers.

Web hosting doesn’t offer the level of flexibility that businesses need to stay current. With fixed plans, templates, and content management systems, there is a limited choice for customers.

Cloud platforms such as DigitalOcean deliver a broad range of options to customers. They can choose from a variety of content management systems, templates, frameworks, widgets, and themes. For developers, the cloud offers the choice of operating systems, languages, runtimes, libraries, and frameworks. It is easy for businesses to test a variety of options before finalizing the best combination that is aligned with the customer expectations.

Many of the contemporary cloud platform vendors offer pre-configured virtual servers that come with popular web applications such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Customers can launch with them a few clicks, and customize them to meet their requirements.

Global PresenceGone are the days where businesses were confined to a specific geographic location. Today, if you have a great product, you can take that to the global audience. With logistics and shipping becoming affordable, consumers don’t compromise on quality. They are going for the best irrespective of the location.

When targeting global customers, it is important to localize and customize your website for the potential regions. Your website should be accessible and responsive to the customers. Web hosting companies do not offer the flexibility of hosting your website in the region of your choice. That increases the latency which slows down the web site performance, which negatively impacts the customer experience.

Cloud providers have a global footprint. DigitalOcean has over 12 datacenters across three continents, which delivers the best possible performance for websites and applications accessed from these locations. Other cloud vendors such as AWS, Google, IBM, and Microsoft have multiple datacenters in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Japan. Businesses can create a web site and easily customize it for each location. This ensures consistent look and feel of the website across all the locations.

ControlWeb hosting providers restrict access to the underlying technology. Since the infrastructure is shared among multiple subscribers, there is limited control over the resources and configuration.

While being flexible, cloud also gives enough control to customers. For those who prefer taking the driver’s seat, the cloud provides root access to the servers. This capability brings ultimate control to the administrators and developers.

When your business grows, you would want to expand your digital presence. DigitalOcean provides an easy upgrade path to your servers. You can start small and gradually increase your investment.

Features such as scheduled backups and snapshots ensure that your online assets are always available. Most of the cloud offerings come with a service level agreement (SLA) of 99.99% which guarantees the availability of the network, power, and server availability.

If you engage a third-party agency for designing, developing, and deploying your web application, the Teams feature of DigitalOcean provides the right level of collaboration to you. With this feature, you can invite and manage users, ensure security with two-factor authentication, and control your resource spend with centralized billing.

If you have decided to go online to embrace digital transformation, it’s time for you to consider cloud instead of a traditional web hosting provider. Cloud computing will make you future proof while delivering many benefits that result in better return on investment from your digital strategy.

@DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo taking place June 6-8, 2017, at Javits Center, New York City, and is co-located with the 20th International Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world.

The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.

@DevOpsSummitwill expand the DevOps community, enable a wide sharing of knowledge, and educate delegates and technology providers alike. Recent research has shown that DevOps dramatically reduces development time, the amount of enterprise IT professionals put out fires, and support time generally. Time spent on infrastructure development is significantly increased, and DevOps practitioners report more software releases and higher quality. Sponsors of @DevOpsSummitwill benefit from unmatched branding, profile building and lead generation opportunities through:

Featured on-site presentation and ongoing on-demand webcast exposure to a captive audience of industry decision-makers.

Showcase exhibition during our new extended dedicated expo hours

Breakout Session Priority scheduling for Sponsors that have been guaranteed a 35-minute technical session

Online advertising in SYS-CON's i-Technology Publications

Capitalize on our Comprehensive Marketing efforts leading up to the show with print mailings, e-newsletters and extensive online media coverage.

All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020. This number will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several decades.

With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing Cloud strategies, now is the perfect time to attend @CloudExpo | @ThingsExpo, June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY and October 31 - November 2, 2017, Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. Learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is on the right path to Digital Transformation.

Delegates to Cloud Expo / @ThingsExpo will be able to attend 8 simultaneous, information-packed education tracks.

There are over 120 breakout sessions in all, with Keynotes, General Sessions, and Power Panels adding to three days of incredibly rich presentations and content.

Join Cloud Expo / @ThingsExpo conference chair Roger Strukhoff (@IoT2040), June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY and October 31 - November 2, 2017, Santa Clara Convention Center, CA for three days of intense Enterprise Cloud and 'Digital Transformation' discussion and focus, including Big Data's indispensable role in IoT, Smart Grids and (IIoT) Industrial Internet of Things, Wearables and Consumer IoT, as well as (new) Digital Transformation in Vertical Markets.

Financial Technology - or FinTech - Is Now Part of the @CloudExpo Program!

Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 20th Cloud Expo / @ThingsExpo June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY and October 31 - November 2, 2017, Santa Clara Convention Center, CA will find fresh new content in a new track called FinTech, which will incorporate machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, and blockchain into one track.

Financial enterprises in New York City, London, Singapore, and other world financial capitals are embracing a new generation of smart, automated FinTech that eliminates many cumbersome, slow, and expensive intermediate processes from their businesses.

FinTech brings efficiency as well as the ability to deliver new services and a much improved customer experience throughout the global financial services industry. FinTech is a natural fit with cloud computing, as new services are quickly developed, deployed, and scaled on public, private, and hybrid clouds.

More than US$20 billion in venture capital is being invested in FinTech this year. @CloudExpo is pleased to bring you the latest FinTech developments as an integral part of our program, starting at the 20th International Cloud Expo June 6-8, 2017 in New York City and October 31 - November 2, 2017 in Silicon Valley.

The upcoming 20th International @CloudExpo | @ThingsExpo, June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY and October 31 - November 2, 2017, Santa Clara Convention Center, CA announces that its Call For Papers for speaking opportunities is open.

About Janakiram MSVJanakiram MSV heads the Cloud Infrastructure Services at Aditi Technologies. He was the founder and CTO of Get Cloud Ready Consulting, a niche Cloud Migration and Cloud Operations firm that recently got acquired by Aditi Technologies. In his current role, he leads a highly talented engineering team that focuses on migrating and managing applications deployed on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.
Janakiram is an industry analyst with deep understanding of Cloud services. Through his speaking, writing and analysis, he helps businesses take advantage of the emerging technologies. He leverages his experience of engaging with the industry in developing informative and practical research, analysis and authoritative content to inform, influence and guide decision makers. He analyzes market trends, new products / features, announcements, industry happenings and the impact of executive transitions.
Janakiram is one of the first few Microsoft Certified Professionals on Windows Azure in India. Demystifying The Cloud, an eBook authored by Janakiram is downloaded more than 100,000 times within the first few months. He is the Chief Editor of a popular portal on Cloud called www.CloudStory.in that covers the latest trends in Cloud Computing. Janakiram is an analyst with the GigaOM Pro analyst network where he analyzes the Cloud Services landscape. He is a guest faculty at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) where he teaches Big Data and Cloud Computing to students enrolled for the Masters course. As a passionate speaker, he has chaired the Cloud Computing track at premier events in India.
He has been the keynote speaker at many premier conferences, and his seminars are attended by thousands of architects, developers and IT professionals. His sessions are rated among the best in every conference he participates.
Janakiram has worked at the world-class product companies including Microsoft Corporation, Amazon Web Services and Alcatel-Lucent. Joining as the first employee of Amazon Web Services in India, he was the AWS Technology Evangelist. Prior to that, Janakiram spent 10 years at Microsoft Corporation where he was involved in selling, marketing and evangelizing the Microsoft Application Platform and Tools.

Consumers increasingly expect their electronic "things" to be connected to smart phones, tablets and the Internet. When that thing happens to be a medical device, the risks and benefits of connectivity must be carefully weighed. Once the decision is made that connecting the device is beneficial, medical device manufacturers must design their products to maintain patient safety and prevent compromised personal health information in the face of cybersecurity threats.
In his session at @ThingsExpo...

In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Mike Johnston, an infrastructure engineer at Supergiant.io, discussed how to use Kubernetes to set up a SaaS infrastructure for your business. Mike Johnston is an infrastructure engineer at Supergiant.io with over 12 years of experience designing, deploying, and maintaining server and workstation infrastructure at all scales. He has experience with brick and mortar data centers as well as cloud providers like Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services, and Rackspace. H...

Detecting internal user threats in the Big Data eco-system is challenging and cumbersome. Many organizations monitor internal usage of the Big Data eco-system using a set of alerts. This is not a scalable process given the increase in the number of alerts with the accelerating growth in data volume and user base. Organizations are increasingly leveraging machine learning to monitor only those data elements that are sensitive and critical, autonomously establish monitoring policies, and to detect...

FinTechs use the cloud to operate at the speed and scale of digital financial activity, but are often hindered by the complexity of managing security and compliance in the cloud. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Sesh Murthy, co-founder and CTO of Cloud Raxak, showed how proactive and automated cloud security enables FinTechs to leverage the cloud to achieve their business goals. Through business-driven cloud security, FinTechs can speed time-to-market, diminish risk and costs, maintain continu...

Existing Big Data solutions are mainly focused on the discovery and analysis of data. The solutions are scalable and highly available but tedious when swapping in and swapping out occurs in disarray and thrashing takes place. The resolution for thrashing through machine learning algorithms and support nomenclature is through simple techniques. Organizations that have been collecting large customer data are increasingly seeing the need to use the data for swapping in and out and thrashing occurs ...

yperConvergence came to market with the objective of being simple, flexible and to help drive down operating expenses. It reduced the footprint by bundling the compute/storage/network into one box. This brought a new set of challenges as the HyperConverged vendors are very focused on their own proprietary building blocks. If you want to scale in a certain way, let’s say you identified a need for more storage and want to add a device that is not sold by the HyperConverged vendor, forget about it....

When you focus on a journey from up-close, you look at your own technical and cultural history and how you changed it for the benefit of the customer. This was our starting point: too many integration issues, 13 SWP days and very long cycles. It was evident that in this fast-paced industry we could no longer afford this reality. We needed something that would take us beyond reducing the development lifecycles, CI and Agile methodologies. We made a fundamental difference, even changed our culture...

In the enterprise today, connected IoT devices are everywhere – both inside and outside corporate environments. The need to identify, manage, control and secure a quickly growing web of connections and outside devices is making the already challenging task of security even more important, and onerous. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Rich Boyer, CISO and Chief Architect for Security at NTT i3, discussed new ways of thinking and the approaches needed to address the emerging challenges of security i...

Docker containers have brought great opportunities to shorten the deployment process through continuous integration and the delivery of applications and microservices. This applies equally to enterprise data centers as well as the cloud. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Jari Kolehmainen, founder and CTO of Kontena, discussed solutions and benefits of a deeply integrated deployment pipeline using technologies such as container management platforms, Docker containers, and the drone.io Cl tool. H...

Cloud adoption is often driven by a desire to increase efficiency, boost agility and save money. All too often, however, the reality involves unpredictable cost spikes and lack of oversight due to resource limitations.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Joe Kinsella, CTO and Founder of CloudHealth Technologies, tackled the question: “How do you build a fully optimized cloud?” He will examine:
Why TCO is critical to achieving cloud success – and why attendees should be thinking holistically ab...

“Why didn’t testing catch this” must become “How did this make it to testing?” Traditional quality teams are the crutch and excuse keeping organizations from making the necessary investment in people, process, and technology to accelerate test automation. Just like societies that did not build waterways because the labor to keep carrying the water was so cheap, we have created disincentives to automate.
In her session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Anne Hungate, President of Daring System...

From 2013, NTT Communications has been providing cPaaS service, SkyWay. Its customer’s expectations for leveraging WebRTC technology are not only typical real-time communication use cases such as Web conference, remote education, but also IoT use cases such as remote camera monitoring, smart-glass, and robotic. Because of this, NTT Communications has numerous IoT business use-cases that its customers are developing on top of PaaS. WebRTC will lead IoT businesses to be more innovative and address...

When shopping for a new data processing platform for IoT solutions, many development teams want to be able to test-drive options before making a choice. Yet when evaluating an IoT solution, it’s simply not feasible to do so at scale with physical devices. Building a sensor simulator is the next best choice; however, generating a realistic simulation at very high TPS with ease of configurability is a formidable challenge. When dealing with multiple application or transport protocols, you would be...

In his session at @ThingsExpo, Arvind Radhakrishnen discussed how IoT offers new business models in banking and financial services organizations with the capability to revolutionize products, payments, channels, business processes and asset management built on strong architectural foundation. The following topics were covered: How IoT stands to impact various business parameters including customer experience, cost and risk management within BFS organizations.

In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Scott Davis, CTO of Embotics, discussed how automation can provide the dynamic management required to cost-effectively deliver microservices and container solutions at scale. He also discussed how flexible automation is the key to effectively bridging and seamlessly coordinating both IT and developer needs for component orchestration across disparate clouds – an increasingly important requirement at today’s multi-cloud enterprise.

In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Chris Carter, CEO of Approyo, discussed the basic set up and solution for an SAP solution in the cloud and what it means to the viability of your company. Chris Carter is CEO of Approyo. He works with business around the globe, to assist them in their journey to the usage of Big Data in the forms of Hadoop (Cloudera and Hortonwork's) and SAP HANA. At Approyo, we support firms who are looking for knowledge to grow through current business process, where even 1%...

In his session at @ThingsExpo, Sudarshan Krishnamurthi, a Senior Manager, Business Strategy, at Cisco Systems, discussed how IT and operational technology (OT) work together, as opposed to being in separate siloes as once was traditional. Attendees learned how to fully leverage the power of IoT in their organization by bringing the two sides together and bridging the communication gap. He also looked at what good leadership must entail in order to accomplish this, and how IT managers can be the ...

Most companies are adopting or evaluating container technology - Docker in particular - to speed up application deployment, drive down cost, ease management and make application delivery more flexible overall. As with most new architectures, this dream takes a lot of work to become a reality. Even when you do get your application componentized enough and packaged properly, there are still challenges for DevOps teams to making the shift to continuous delivery and achieving that reduction in cost ...

For financial firms, the cloud is going to increasingly become a crucial part of dealing with customers over the next five years and beyond, particularly with the growing use and acceptance of virtual currencies. There are new data storage paradigms on the horizon that will deliver secure solutions for storing and moving sensitive financial data around the world without touching terrestrial networks.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Cliff Beek, President of Cloud Constellation Corporation, d...

Deep learning has been very successful in social sciences and specially areas where there is a lot of data. Trading is another field that can be viewed as social science with a lot of data. With the advent of Deep Learning and Big Data technologies for efficient computation, we are finally able to use the same methods in investment management as we would in face recognition or in making chat-bots. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Gaurav Chakravorty, co-founder and Head of Strategy Development ...

As businesses adopt functionalities in cloud computing, it’s imperative that IT operations consistently ensure cloud systems work correctly – all of the time, and to their best capabilities. In his session at @BigDataExpo, Bernd Harzog, CEO and founder of OpsDataStore, presented an industry answer to the common question, “Are you running IT operations as efficiently and as cost effectively as you need to?” He then expounded on the industry issues he frequently came up against as an analyst, and ...

In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Kelly Looney, director of DevOps consulting for Skytap, showed how an incremental approach to introducing containers into complex, distributed applications results in modernization with less risk and more reward. He also shared the story of how Skytap used Docker to get out of the business of managing infrastructure, and into the business of delivering innovation and business value. Attendees learned how up-front planning allows for a clean sep...

Blockchain is a shared, secure record of exchange that establishes trust, accountability and transparency across supply chain networks. Supported by the Linux Foundation's open source, open-standards based Hyperledger Project, Blockchain has the potential to improve regulatory compliance, reduce cost and time for product recall as well as advance trade. Are you curious about Blockchain and how it can provide you with new opportunities for innovation and growth?
In her session at 20th Cloud Exp...

IoT is at the core or many Digital Transformation initiatives with the goal of re-inventing a company's business model. We all agree that collecting relevant IoT data will result in massive amounts of data needing to be stored. However, with the rapid development of IoT devices and ongoing business model transformation, we are not able to predict the volume and growth of IoT data. And with the lack of IoT history, traditional methods of IT and infrastructure planning based on the past do not app...

In IT, we sometimes coin terms for things before we know exactly what they are and how they’ll be used. The resulting terms may capture a common set of aspirations and goals – as “cloud” did broadly for on-demand, self-service, and flexible computing. But such a term can also lump together diverse and even competing practices, technologies, and priorities to the point where important distinctions are glossed over and lost.

Internet-of-Things discussions can end up either going down the consumer gadget rabbit hole or focused on the sort of data logging that industrial manufacturers have been doing forever. However, in fact, companies today are already using IoT data both to optimize their operational technology and to improve the experience of customer interactions in novel ways. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Gordon Haff, Red Hat Technology Evangelist, shared examples from a wide range of industries – including en...

Enterprise architects are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies as they seek to utilize existing data center assets, leverage the advantages of cloud computing and avoid cloud vendor lock-in. This requires a globally aware traffic management strategy that can monitor infrastructure health across data centers and end-user experience globally, while responding to control changes and system specification at the speed of today’s DevOps teams. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Josh Gray, Chie...

All organizations that did not originate this moment have a pre-existing culture as well as legacy technology and processes that can be more or less amenable to DevOps implementation. That organizational culture is influenced by the personalities and management styles of Executive Management, the wider culture in which the organization is situated, and the personalities of key team members at all levels of the organization. This culture and entrenched interests usually throw a wrench in the work...

What sort of WebRTC based applications can we expect to see over the next year and beyond? One way to predict development trends is to see what sorts of applications startups are building. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Arin Sime, founder of WebRTC.ventures, discussed the current and likely future trends in WebRTC application development based on real requests for custom applications from real customers, as well as other public sources of information.

Your homes and cars can be automated and self-serviced. Why can't your storage? From simply asking questions to analyze and troubleshoot your infrastructure, to provisioning storage with snapshots, recovery and replication, your wildest sci-fi dream has come true.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Dan Florea, Director of Product Management at Tintri, provided a ChatOps demo where you can talk to your storage and manage it from anywhere, through Slack and similar services with...

This week I had the pleasure of delivering the opening keynote at Cloud Expo New York. It was amazing to be back in the great city of New York with thousands of cloud enthusiasts eager to learn about the next step on their journey to embracing a cloud-first worldl."

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I recently had the opportunity to give a 10-minute keynote at DataWorks Summit 2017. I know what most of you are thinking: Schmarzo can barely introduce himself in 10 minutes! What sort of keynote could he give in just 10 minutes? And to be honest, I too struggled with what to say.
But after some brainstorming with my marketing experts (Jeff Abbott, Erin Banks, and Chris Hill), we came up with an idea: Pose 5 questions that every organization needs to consider as they prepare themselves for digital transformation. And while I didn’t have enough time in 10 minutes to answer those questions...

Because IoT devices are deployed in mission-critical environments more than ever before, it’s increasingly imperative they be truly smart. IoT sensors simply stockpiling data isn’t useful. IoT must be artificially and naturally intelligent in order to provide more value
In his session at @ThingsExpo, John Crupi, Vice President and Engineering System Architect at Greenwave Systems, will discuss how IoT artificial intelligence (AI) can be carried out via edge analytics and machine learning technologies that enable things to process event data at the source, learn patterns of behavior over time...

FinTechs use the cloud to operate at the speed and scale of digital financial activity, but are often hindered by the complexity of managing security and compliance in the cloud. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Sesh Murthy, co-founder and CTO of Cloud Raxak, showed how proactive and automated cloud security enables FinTechs to leverage the cloud to achieve their business goals. Through business-driven cloud security, FinTechs can speed time-to-market, diminish risk and costs, maintain continuous compliance, and set themselves up for success.

We all probably remember the movie (“Jurassic Park”), even if we don’t remember this exact scene: Dr. Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum is explaining Chaos Theory to Dr. Ellie Sattler, played by Laura Dern.
Dr. Malcolm is explaining how random, seemingly negligible events can disrupt even the most carefully laid out plans.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: [after the T-Rex failed to appear for the tour group]. “You see a Tyrannosaur doesn’t follow a set pattern or park schedules, the essence of chaos.”

Increasingly, in a world of compressed times and distances, humans will be the inventors, designers and managers of digital systems and processes, rather than the operators. Operations will be measured in milliseconds, an inhumane speed where only the machines can deliver.
Professor Paul Virilio, a philosopher of speed, urbanist and cultural theorist, wrote at length about the impact of speed on society. He wrote that speed compresses both time and distance. Where once it took a letter 6 months to get to the other side of the world, an email can now arrive in seconds. Today's near real-tim...

"Suddenly a lot of companies started focusing on producing services in the cloud. I like to call it Cloud Native - everything is built for the cloud. The main concept there is to enable developers to work fast," explained Ben Bernstein, CEO & Co-Founder of Twistlock, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

These days, change is the only constant. In order to adapt and thrive in an ever-advancing and sometimes chaotic workforce, companies must leverage intelligent tools to streamline operations. While we're only at the dawn of machine intelligence, using a workflow manager will benefit your company in both the short and long term. Think: reduced errors, improved efficiency and more empowered employees-and that's just the start. Here are five other reasons workflow automation is leading a revolution in the 9-5 world.

In our first installment of this blog series, we went over the different types of applications migrated to the cloud and the benefits IT organizations hope to achieve by moving applications to the cloud.
Unfortunately, IT can’t just press a button or even whip up a few lines of code to move applications to the cloud. Like any strategic move by IT, a cloud migration requires advanced planning.

In 2016, artificial intelligence (AI) reached its climax. Research and advisory firm Tractica predicted that the annual worldwide AI revenue will grow from $643.7 million in 2016 to $38.8 billion by 2025. The revenue for enterprise AI applications will increase from $358 million in 2016 to $31.2 billion by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 64.3%. Thus, IT and business decision makers must face up to the potentials of AI already today. For each kind of organization this leads to the question, which type of technologies or infrastructure they can leverage to operate an A...

The renowned military strategist John Boyd taught that people and institutions collect favorite philosophies, strategies, theories and ideologies over a period of time, and then try to align the future to fit them. The problem with this is the future is rarely like the past, and trying to fit new data into old paradigms often forces us to perform irrational mental gymnastics, which leaves us farther from the truth.

Digital technology innovations and advancements, and our adoption of them, have changed us. We are different consumers, employers and employees. Our expectations have increased. We have become mobile, impatient and demanding. We are global. We demand immediate, accurate and real-time responses. We use our technology not just for reading historic events and news, but also for predicting our future turn while navigating at 60 MPH.

Blockchain is a shared, secure record of exchange that establishes trust, accountability and transparency across business networks. Supported by the Linux Foundation's open source, open-standards based Hyperledger Project, Blockchain has the potential to improve regulatory compliance, reduce cost as well as advance trade. Are you curious about how Blockchain is built for business? In her session at 21st Cloud Expo, René Bostic, Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America, will discuss the basics of Blockchain, preview the Blockchain Reference Architecture, and introduce the mechanics o...

We have Continuous Integration and we have Continuous Deployment, but what’s continuous across all of what we do is people. Even when tasks are automated, someone wrote the automation. So, Jayne Groll evangelizes about Continuous Everyone. Jayne is the CEO of the DevOps Institute and the author of Agile Service Management Guide. She talked about Continuous Everyone at the 2016 All Day DevOps conference. She describes it as "about people, culture, and collaboration mapped into your value streams."

With 10 simultaneous tracks, keynotes, general sessions and targeted breakout classes, Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo are two of the most important technology events of the year. Since its launch over eight years ago, Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo have presented a rock star faculty as well as showcased hundreds of sponsors and exhibitors! In this blog post, I provide 7 tips on how, as part of our world-class faculty, you can deliver one of the most popular sessions at our events. But before reading these essential tips, please take a moment and watch this brief video from Sandy Carter.

One of the core benefits of Java is the JVM, which is an out-of-the-box memory management. Essentially, we can create objects and the Java Garbage Collector will take care of allocating and freeing up memory for us.
Nevertheless, memory leaks can still occur in Java applications.
In this article, we're going to describe the most common memory leaks, understand their causes, and look at a few techniques to detect/avoid them. We're also going to use the Java YourKit profiler throughout the article, to analyze the state of our memory at runtime.

SYS-CON Events announced today that GrapeUp, the leading provider of rapid product development at the speed of business, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Grape Up is a software company, specialized in cloud native application development and professional services related to Cloud Foundry PaaS. With five expert teams that operate in various sectors of the market across the USA and Europe, we work with a variety of customers from emerging startups to Fortune 1000 c...

Fast-paced changes in the business landscape demand enterprises to rethink their existing business models and add innovative capabilities keeping in mind the new imperatives. One among them is the focus on Digital transformation. In the retail industry, growth is measured in terms of increased sales and value addition to existing products while keeping customer expectations in mind. This is where a digital focus is important to remain competitive.

In the cloud era, you as an IT professional are being forced to adopt new roles and take on new responsibilities you may not feel equipped to handle. Businesses are becoming increasingly hybrid, leaving you to manage, secure, monitor, and remediate technology on-premises and in the cloud. Of course, this comes with risks because it means you must manage mission-critical layers of application services across networks, systems, and services you neither own nor control. In fact, in many cases, you may not even have visibility into all the environments you’re responsible to ensure the performance ...

SYS-CON Events announced today that DXWorldExpo has been named “Global Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Digital Transformation is the key issue driving the global enterprise IT business. Digital Transformation is most prominent among Global 2000 enterprises and government institutions.

Knowledge that doesn’t serve is knowledge wasted. And for knowledge gained from experience and research to be useful, IT enterprises need to organize, manage and offer it in the best way possible. Fortunately, the best way isn’t a Herculean task when you employ simple tricks to build a profound knowledge base (KB). A sound knowledge base eliminates the need to rediscover or reformulate knowledge and improves the support process. With that in mind, consider these best practices to help build a successful knowledge base.